Information, Computer and Network Security Terms Glossary and Dictionary

Birthday Attack

A birthday attack refers to a class of brute-force attacks, which gets its name from the surprising result that the probability that two or more people in a group of 23 share the same birthday is greater than 1/2; such a result is called a birthday paradox. Mathematically, if some function, when supplied with a random input, returns one of k equally-likely values, then by repeatedly evaluating the function for different inputs, we expect to obtain the same output after about 1.2 sqrt(k). For the above birthday paradox, replace k with 365. Birthday attacks are often used to find collisions of hash functions. To avoid this attack, the output length of the hash function used for a signature scheme can be chosen large enough so that the birthday attack becomes computationally infeasible.

Related Terms

Birthday Attack